Pi Communications covets share of TV news pie

In the pressures on television news budgets, there may be one winner: the companies to which infrastructural services such as outside broadcasts are outsourced.

Pi Communications, the broadcast facilities company that underpins Oireachtas TV, is launching a satellite van service next year that it expects broadcasters will book for short news reports and entertainment inserts.

"Broadcasters are all the time looking for cheaper ways of doing things," says Pi's co-founder and managing director Norah Anne Barron.

The van, which is similar to one operated by Pi in Northern Ireland, will use lower cost Ka-band satellite technology that Barron says has the potential to "revolutionise" news gathering.

Pi, which also provides broadcasting services to the Northern Ireland Assembly, runs another van it calls "the Explorer" that uses a robotic camera system to film business conferences, university seminars, events such as September's TEDxStormont talks and gatherings that need to be "open and transparent" such as the Constitutional Convention meetings.

“We have taken television technology and moved it into a business-to-business service,” says Ms Barron.

The 14-year-old company has been in expansion mode and now employs about 40 people. Next on the target client list is local government.

Pi, which has offices in Belfast, Dublin and London, is looking to develop a “very affordable”, automated system for filming council meetings that trumps the webcam-quality that has prevailed in the sector to date.